Friday, November 14, 2014

If you love geologic history and haven’t read John McPhee, you are truly missing something:"There is no one of whom I am aware with a more facile understanding of thelanguage. As a expository writer he has no equal; I feel as if I am in the physicalpresence of the man as he unravels a scene. In his book "Coming Into the Country" he paints a scene wherein a man looks down into a crystallinestream. There are so many fish he remarks it as if he is "looking up into a skyfull of zeppelins." He is, in my mind, one of the finest writers to ever have putink to paper. He is sine qua non; pure and simple. If I could have but one McPhee, I would be most content with "Giving Good Weight", assuming I wasignorant of his other wonderful books. It would be a hardship for a devotee ofthis American treasure to have access to but one McPhee.” Ambroid Phlexes

John Angus McPhee is an American writer, widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008 he received the George Polk Career Award for his “ ndelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career."

Annals of the Former World (1989) brings together John McPhee's four previous book on US geology with a new closing essay and the sum surpasses its parts. Geology is a descriptive science and McPhee's book is above all a kind of dictionary fieldwork in the depths, shales and dispositions of a technical language. It's a Dostoyevskian book because you have to live with it for weeks. Not because it is that big (it's less than 700 pages of medium typeset, not the 1500 pages of fine print of The Brothers Karamazov) but because the abundant descriptions of rock and outcrops are the reading equivalent to a 7+ grade boulder climb. The second thing that is at the heart of McPhee's geological project is his sly but constant coupling of geological and human time frames. This book deals with geology but its subject, in the last analysis, is the human condition. Annals of the Former World is the great non-fiction competitor to all the great American novels. It's view of America in geological time is itself a critique on the basic assumptions of, say, the religious right and all other short sighted voices. And it has great maps to boot.

I may check the book out as a Christmas gift for my wife. She is an ardent rock hound. We can't go on vacation, to the park, or even through the neighborhood without her bringing home a few. People gift her rocks from all over.

Over the years, I have come to the suspicion she might be planning to plant me out in the back yard and build a cairn over me when the time comes in order to save on burial expenses.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.